(There is a more up to date version of this script here)
Hey folks, and welcome to my first proper blog post. One of the things that I like to monitor through my daily checks in the file size and the free space of each file within the databases. During a busy loading period, some databases can grow massively, so it’s important to keep an eye on the growth. Through the UI, SSMS only gives us the size of the files and what the max size is that they can grow to, which is clearly not very useful. Fortunately, a quick query on the dbo.sysfiles of each databases that we want to monitor gives us some info:

but this isn’t entirely too useful. For starters the size is in KB. This makes sense as databases store data in 8kb sized files. Whilst it may be OK for a small database like this one, our data warehouses are far to big for us to find sizes in KB useful. Also, we can infer the remaining space, but again it’s not too helpful by having to figure this out for ourselves.